“…Evangelical Christianity in the United States is currently in a dramatic state of change. Yet amidst this sometimes tumultuous religious environment a rather unique blend of both ancient and contemporary Christian theology has found its way into the hearts and minds of emerging generations of Christians. The Theology of Dallas Willard both describes and conveys the essence of this increasingly popular and perhaps mediating view of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Blending both a prophetic critique with pastoral encouragement, Willard's unique understanding of the reality present within a life lived as a disciple of Jesus in the kingdom of God is attracting both new and traditional Christians to reconsider their faith.”

David Fitch recommends it with these words:

"Gary Black writes a comprehensive and penetrating survey of the thought and context of one of American evangelicalism's most influential reformers. The resulting analysis—The Theology of Dallas Willard—is worth studying and then studying some more, because Dallas Willard is that important to the future of the church in North America."

—David Fitch, author of Prodigal Christianity

For a brief (written) interview with Richard Foster and Dallas Willard on the difference between discipleship and spiritual formationgo here.

Thursday, 30 January 2014

“…We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it.

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

It becomes sort of obvious once you say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good. Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept; goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all. People whom we call “good people” are always people who have learned how to include contradictions and others, even at risk to their own proper self-image or their social standing. This is quite obvious in Jesus…”

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

Today a fascinating and all too short conversation with one of my favourite film directors on the subject of peace and perception. Many of the themes are applicable on both a national / global and also at the relational and interpersonal level.

“Ten years ago Wim Wenders began a conversation with Mary Zournazi on war and peace. Drawing on philosophy, art and cinema their dialogue evolved into a sustained meditation on perception in a world of rapidly multiplying images. We join the philosopher and the filmmaker on their quest to make peace visible. Can anadequate moral and visual language for peace be defined in the clamour of the times?”

'Reading this book brings a sense of enormous privilege – the privilege of overhearing a conversation between two voices of profound seriousness and imagination. The peace they talk about is neither a matter of problem-solving nor a dream of immobile quiet; it is the remaking of the world by patient looking, educated in compassion and self-awareness. We learn something essential of what art is (not least the art of the film-maker) and of how it is the necessary nourishment for a humane public life.'

Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and former Archbishop of Canterbury.

Monday, 27 January 2014

I love questions. Questions have always felt more important to me than answers. Questions have always been stepping-stones. Sheila Pritchard (thanks Sheila) directed me to a series of articles by transpersonal psychologist and psychotherapist Kathleen Dowling Singh. The one that initially caught my attention was the article, Taking a Spiritual Inventory, a short but profound invitation. I have reproduced it below, in full, and the questions are ones I’ll take time, this year, to reflect on.

As far as I know I’m not dying but over the last two or three years I’ve had to sit with similar questions in the face of verbal and emotional abuse. Self-assessment, deep honesty, the courage to face into the realities of who we truly are and to begin to see myself as God see’s me have been important practices. It has been a time of ‘death’ and re-birth… a time of letting go, a time of holding on to what is important, a time of new seeing, and a time of recovery and renewal.

Here it is, the article reproduced in full. The image attaching to this post is one gifted to me by an artist friend, MA:

“The fact of death is the great mystery and the great truth that illuminates our lives. To face our own imminent death is to examine our lives with an urgency and honesty we may never have felt before.

A spiritual assessment is a helpful practice as we move close to dying. Such an assessment seems to arise naturally in the course of the profound psychological and spiritual transformations of dying. Since we all share the same human condition, many terminally ill people report asking themselves the same questions. These are many of the questions that those who have had a near-death experience report that they have been asked. They are questions that pierce through the frivolousness at the surface of life and confront us with the value and significance this precious gift of a human life offers.

It is not too late to take stock of our lives, even in the last weeks and days of terminal illness. And for those of us in the midst of life, in the apparent safety and security of our health, it is not too early. No matter how much time we have left to live, the answers to the following questions, voiced in the quiet honesty of our own hearts, provide direction to the rest of our living.

Who have I been all this time?

How have I used my gift of a human life?

What do I need to "clear up" or "let go of" in order to be more peaceful?

What gives my life meaning?

For what am I grateful?

What have I learned of truth and how truthfully have I learned to live?

What have I learned of love and how well have I learned to love?

What have I learned about tenderness, vulnerability, intimacy, and communion?

What have I learned about courage, strength, power, and faith?

What have I learned of the human condition and how great is my compassion?

How am I handling my suffering?

How can I best share what I've learned?

What helps me open my heart and empty my mind and experience the presence of Spirit?

What will give me strength as I die? What is my relationship with that which will give me strength as I die?

If I remembered that my breaths were numbered, what would be my relationship to this breath right now?

These lectures – Reviving Christian Psychology – in part, relate to Charry’s second publication, a follow-up of sorts to By The Renewing of Your Minds. It’s titled God and the Art of Happiness (Eerdmans, 2010). I’ve yet to read this book, so, if like me you haven’t read it and want a summary, you’ll find two reviews of the book. One here, and the other here.

You’ll find the lectures on iTunes here. The outline of the lectures is shown below:

Charry’s goal is to argue that “retrieving a Christian psychology inspired by Augustine will offer an alternative to the modern secular psychological paradigm. Lecture 1: Psychological Theology. Theology and psychology are separated because each his forgotten its origin and task. Today there are serious points of tension between the two separated ‘disciplines’. This is artificial from the perspective of theology that has psychology embedded in it. Retrieving it for practical application will only be possible with the help of contemporary psychology and medically related fields. Lecture 2: Understanding Saint Augustine’s Theological Psychology. To retrieve Christian psychology, we must begin at its source. St. Augustine of Hippo gave us a holistic theotherapeutic interpretation of the self. His psychology of the Christian self/soul integrates emotional and cognitive activities into a pilgrimage into the vision of God while recognizing temperamental and personality variables and the effects these have on cognition and understanding. He offers a construal of psychological development, as well as a theory of cognition and knowing. Lecture 3: Recovering Augustinian Psychology. In this final lecture she examines Augustine’s vision of psychological healing as the soul’s journey into God that is a straightening and redirecting of our loves. This also illustrates the difficulty of simply integrating theology and science, for the latter intends to be value-neutral while Augustinian psychology depends on drawing the patient or client into a mutually loving relationship with God.”

Friday, 24 January 2014

I found valuable a recently published article (The Way, 52/4 (Oct. 2-13). Pp. 1-14) by Jesuit Brian O’Leary: Ignatian Mysticism and Contemporary Culture. You’ll find the paper in its entirety here.

Meantime, here’s an excerpt from pages 7-9:

“…Within his theocentric world-view, Ignatius gave full value to the human… To associate the dignity of each human person with a creator God does not lessen, but on the contrary enhances, that dignity. The human person is made in the image and likeness of God. What greater dignity can there be?

…the humanity of Jesus becomes the focal point… During the Renaissance to be human was a cause for celebration, and to be fully human was the goal of life. Ignatius acquiesced in this, so long as the human was being feted, not in a reductive sense, and not apart from God. For him the real value of the human precisely derived from its being immersed in God. The human is the field of God’s activity, and Christ’s humanity is the privileged instrument of God’s engagement in our world. Our humanity, too, can become an instrument in God’s hands, totally at God’s disposal… We will then be approaching the mysteries of Christ’s life and our own with the same contemplative gaze. In this way a kind of blending occurs by which we see Christ’s life experience through the lens of our own, and we see our life experience through the lens of Christ’s…”

Thursday, 23 January 2014

Psychology Today recently featured a three-part interview with Thomas Moore. The interview engages themes in Moore’s latest book - A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World.

“Nature, monastic vows, building a spiritual library, honoring the dead, the Zen concept of emptiness, and the loss of his friend and colleague, post-Jungian thinker James Hillman, are among the rich sampling of topics from part two of my interview with Thomas Moore, author of A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating Personal Spirituality in a Secular World. A former monk, psychotherapist, musician and scholar of religion, Moore explains that while he encourages individuals to develop their own personal spirituality outside the boundaries of organized traditions, he is not against religion. Rather, he advocates the revolutionary path of finding a “different way of dealing" with religion by studying and learning from the world’s various traditions—then composing those tenets into a faith of one’s own.” ~ Pythia Peay.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

On the day the gift of a copy of a book on the theology and practice of lament arrived from a good friend, I’d been reading Thomas Ogden, and also a review of one of his books. I was struck by his naming of the importance of mourning and of working healthily with “loss”. I reflected on my actions and the practices of writing, talking and reflecting at depth (and as honestly as possible) over many years – either individually, or in conversation. It’s felt like a work of “creation”, a work of relating at ever-deeper levels to interior realities. It’s ushered in a “new voice”; a more authentic way of being and acting.

Psychoanalyst “…[Thomas] Ogden focuses on the art of mourning what has been in order to free us up to new possibilities of living. He illustrates a series of psychological issues involved in discerning the living voices and music that characterizes the past and the struggle to find oneself fully in the present through thoughtful studies of essays and poems by [Jorge Luis] Borges and [Seamus] Heaney, followed-up with moving clinical vignettes. His central thesis is that “mourning is not simply a form of psychological work; it is a process centrally involving the experience of making something, creating something adequate to the experience of loss…. [Mourning represents] the individual’s effort to meet, to be equal to, to do justice to, the fullness and complexity of his or her relationship to what has been lost, and to the experience of loss itself” (pp. 117-8). As such, Ogden ponders how each participant in the analytic process engages in the on-going art of mourning. He also speaks of the creation of new voice through morning – “…no voice, no person, no aspect of one’s life can replace another. But there can be a sense that the new voice has somehow been there all along in the old ones…” (p. 152).

“…Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities--businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, and government - do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together. We know what healthy communities look like--there are many success stories out there, and they've been described in detail. What Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.”

It’s this latter book that is the focus of a Sounds True conversation between Tami Simon and Peter Block.

“…How do we create organizations that work for everyone? What’s the true role of the person called “the boss?” How is the concept of business stewardship different from our traditional notions of leadership? Where can we find true freedom in the workplace? Peter Block is a bestselling author and business consultant who teaches about chosen accountability and the reconciliation of community. Tami Simon speaks with Peter about these questions and more in a business conversation unlike any you’ve heard.”

Here’s a couple of quotes strung together (a little bit of paraphrasing too):

“...Leadership is to initiate an alternative future. It’s an act on intention, an act of creativity…the task of leadership is to figure out the question we need to be asking and exploring together… The question is more powerful than the answer… A good question works on you…it opens space for other possibilities, for the unseen, and for alternative futures and possibilities…”